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TREATY OF PEACE WITH GERMANY 



SPEECH 

OF 

HON. SELDEN P. SPENCER 

OF MISSOURI 

IN THE 

SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES 



TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 1919 



WASHINGTON 

1919 

136536—19853 




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AUG 2 8 194? 






SPEECH 

OF 

HON. SELDEN P. SPENCEE, 



TREATY OF PEACE WITH GERMANY. 

Mr. SPENCER. Mr. President, the President, speaking last 
week in the State of Missouri, presented to the people of the 
State, in regard to the league of nations, an issue which does 
not exist. 

The issue before the American people in connection with the 
treaty of peace and the covenant of the league of nations is not, 
as the President indicates, a choice between acceptance or re- 
jection of the treaty. We are not necessarily called upon to 
choose between acceptance of the treaty precisely as it is written 
or, failing thus to accept it, to face absolute rejection of the 
entire negotiations. I am frank to say for myself if I were forced 
to make that choice I should vote against the treaty as it now 
stands. 

I have no sympathy with proposed changes, under whatever 
name they may be called, which are offered mainly in the desire 
and with the intention to kill the treaty or to so complicate the 
situation as to destroy or endanger its ratification. There are 
too many commendable provisions in the covenant of the league 
of nations that deserve a confident trial and too many treaty 
provisions that are essential to the interests of this Government 
to have the treaty itself killed; but I have every sympathy with 
and a clear conviction in favor of such reservations as will 
safeguard the essential rights of our country, and such reser- 
vations are far more important alike for the interests of the 
United States and for the welfare of the world than an imper- 
fect, American-jeopardizing league of nations can ever be. 

Quite apart from our own national standpoint, it is essential 
for the peace of the world that the United States should continue 
to be as it was when we entered the war, the great independent 
stabilizing power of the world. In any future event of world 
danger we will be of far greater service if we stand ready to 
strike quickly, if force be necessary, and with invincible power, 
as our conscience and judgment shall at the time incline us, 
unfettered by entanglements and alliances that may throw a 
mist around our wisdom and make difficult the path of honor 
and duty. 

The real issue before the American people is as to whether 
they prefer to take the treaty precisely as it is written or to 
have such reservations ingrafted into it as will absolutely safe- 
guard our American rights, constitutional, domestic, and tradi- 
tional, and fully protect our independence of action as a Nation 
in the future. It is not unfair to state, in the light of known 
facts, that the treaty of peace which we are now considering 
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is peculiarly — and it seems to me unfortunately, so far as the 
United States is concerned — a one-man document. Always here- 
tofore in the negotiations with other nations it has been usual 
first for our ambassadors or our commissioners to arrive as best 
they could at an agreement with the other nations concerning 
the subject of the treaty ; and when, after the exercise of their 
best judgment, they have finally arrived at an agreement, it has 
then been forwarded to the President, who, in conference with 
the State Department, has given to it the weight of their joint 
consideration and judgment, with the view to correct and to per- 
fect ; and it is only when the treaty has thus been subjected, so 
far as the interests of this Government are concerned, to the 
consideration of at least two partially separate and independent 
agencies, that it finally comes to the Semite under the provision 
of the Constitution for the advice and consent of the Senate. 

Manifestly, such a course has been of the utmost advantage 
in protecting the interests of this country. It does not neces- 
sarily follow, because a treaty has been deprived of this triple 
consideration and has been the result of the judgment and will 
of a single man, that it ought to be rejected, but it certainly 
is true that there can be no just complaint if such a one-man 
treaty is subjected to the most careful examination and con- 
sideration, and particularly when, as in the present instance, 
it is a treaty that concerns the interests of this country and the 
welfare of the world more greatly than any document ever before 
penned by the hand of man. The representative of every other 
great nation at the peace table had back of him both legislative 
sanction and legislative cooperation. The President of the 
Unitr-ii States alone of those with whom he was associated 
acted without either such sanction or conference. It was a 
position of autocratic power, which is as rare as it is unfortu- 
nate in a Republic. In the one case of which we have accurate 
knowledge, of the four gentlemen whom the President had asso- 
ciated with him as commissioners to represent the United States, 
at least three were clear and positive in the expression of 
their judgment that the provision of the treaty with regard to 
the Shantung Peninsula was a violation of our own American 
polity, an injustice to China, and an unnecessary yielding to the 
unfair demands of Japan ; and yet the fact that his joint com- 
missioners so determined and so advised did not change by a 
hair's breadth the action of the United States in regard to 
Shantung. It was written precisely as the will and judgment 
of the President finally consented that it should be written, 
and entirely irrespective of the wishes or judgment or con- 
science of his associates. 

When, as the President solemnly declares, the secret treaty 
between England and France and Italy and Japan was first 
called to his attention at Paris, I am sure it is inconceivable 
to many upon the floor of this Chamber, as it is to me, why, as 
an American — and particularly as an American who had an- 
nounced in lofty phraseology which has never been excelled, and 
rarely equaled, the great principles that should control his 
action and his opposition to secret treaties between great 
powers affecting the rights of unconsenting people — I say, it is 
inconceivable why, as an American, he should not instantly 
have said to the representatives of England and Prance and 
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Italy and Japan who were seated with him at the table some- 
thing in substance like this: 

"Gentlemen, I learn for the first time of the secret treaty 
which you have made between yourselves. I do not impugn 
the motive or the necessity which may have been the cause of 
its original creation, but as we now come together to con- 
sider the welfare of the world, and to consider it alone upon the 
principles of honor and of justice, I say to you in the name 
of the United States that before we enter upon this conference 
that secret treaty, by the consent of every one of you who 
formed it, must now be laid upon the table and canceled, in 
order that we may proceed, unfettered by secrecy, to do now 
what is right in the matter. I will not enter into* a conference 
with my hands tied by a secret arrangement concerning which 
I had no information whatsoever." 

No one who realizes the commanding importance of the posi- 
tion of the United States at that conference can have the 
slightest doubt that a demand of the kind indicated would have 
been instantly complied with, and we should have at least been 
saved the humiliating disgrace of having our representatives 
voluntarily enter into an arrangement which they themselves 
are unable to defend and which the Nation looks upon with 
shame. There are lawyers in this body, and it is inconceivable 
to a lawyer that he, together with four colleagues, should sit 
upon, a bench and undertake the determination of a question, 
when he knew that three of those four colleagues had already 
prejudged the very case upon which he was then called to 
decide. China, as the litigant, comes before the " big five." 
There is England, and Italy, and France, and Japan, and the 
United States, and before that tribunal China pleads her 
cause, when three of that court had already, by a secret treaty 
with a fourth member of that court, absolutely predetermined 
the question which China was then presenting. 

I say, with all the conviction in my power, that the treaty 
of peace as it is now written will never be ratified by the Sen- 
ate of the United States, and that before it ever receives the 
sanction of the representatives of the people here assembled, 
reservations similar in effect to those which the Committee on 
Foreign Relations have already reported must be inseparably 
interwoven with the ratification itself. Language and detail 
of reservations may be changed, but the purpose and the object 
of every one of those four reservations are essential to the fu- 
ture greatness and stability of this country. 

Concerning the inherent merit of the reservations themselves 
there can be no difference of opinion. Every one of them an- 
nounces an American doctrine which is essential to the preser- 
vation of the Republic. The principles which they enunciate 
are principles about which, as Americans, we are all agreed. 
The only answer that has been made or that can be made to 
them is either that they are unnecessary, because the rights 
which they seek to protect are already safeguarded in the 
treaty itself, or because to ingraft them into the ratification 
would create complications with other nations more disastrous 
than the advantage of the reservations could possibly be. The 
answer to the first proposition is simple and complete. If there 
is no objection to the inherent merit of the principles announced 
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by the reservations, then, at the most, they can be nothing more 
than mere surplusage, amplifying or elucidating that which is 
already provided in the treaty itself; but there are multitudes 
of people who believe, as I believe, and as I expect by a single 
illustration to demonstrate in a moment to the Senate, that the 
principles safeguarded by these reservations are not protected 
in the treaty as it is now written, that the essential rights of 
our country are in real, not imagined, jeopardy, by the existing 
provisions of the league of nations, and that not alone because 
of that candor and fairness which is due to other nations, but 
in order to insure confidence and understanding at home, it is 
essential that our established rights be indicated in language 
that can not be misunderstood. 

The answer to the second defense is precisely the same, for 
if, as I believe and assert, our right of withdrawal and the 
safeguarding of the Monroe doctrine and the protection of 
our domestic and internal affairs and our position before the 
world that no other nation or combination of nations can 
ever be allowed to dictate when or where an American sol- 
dier or sailor shall be sent, are jeopardized by the treaty 
as it is now written, then whatever may be the complica- 
tions that may result from insisting upon such vital rights, 
such complications fade into insignificance in comparison with 
our essential duty to safeguard our own country. I can not see 
any delay or complication that ought to follow from American 
safeguarding reservations. If, as the President declares, the 
principles of these reservations are already written into the 
treaty as it now stands and are accepted by every other nation, 
certainly there can be neither delay nor complication in any 
consent either by express approval or by acquiescence in reser- 
vations which express in clearer terms that to which the nations 
have already consented. 

I said by a single illustration I intended to establish that 
some of the fundamental rights of this country are in jeopardy. 
Here is my illustration : It seems as if those who wrote article 10 
of the league of nations had in mind, and wisely had in mind, 
the prevention of external aggression upon the territorial integ- 
rity of any other nation, because such external aggression 
breeded war. and war was the thing which the league of nations 
wauled to make impossible. They failed, however, to recognize 
that there may be external aggression upon the territorial in- 
tegrity of another nation which is absolutely essential to the 
integrity of the invading government, and in no case is that 
more clear than with the United States. 

If we had a map of the United States upon the wall, we 
could refresh our memory by looking at the State of California. 
At the south of the State of California there extends southward 
generally that long peninsula which is called Lower California. 
It has little agricultural value. The cost of irrigation that would 
make it agriculturally available is prohibitive. But it has 
upon its western border the Bay of Magdalena, the most won- 
derful assembling ground for a navy upon the whole Pacific 
coast, except perhaps the port of San Francisco, and it has great 
fields that lend themselves to the mobilization of an army. 

Lower California belongs to Mexico. Mexico has long wanted 
to sell. The distinguished Senator from Arizona [Mr. Ashuest] 
136536—19853 



has upon more than one occasion advocated the acquisition of 
Lower California upon the part of this Government by pur- 
chase. Mexico has been seeking a purchaser. Japan has wanted 
to buy. I do not know, nor does any other Senator upon the 
floor of the Senate know, that Japan has not already bought 
Lower California. When there is an article in commerce and 
he who has it is keen to sell and is met by some one eager to 
buy and unmindful of the price, the consummated sale is apt 
to follow. If Japan has bought it, or if Japan should buy it, it 
immediately has become or would become the territorial integ- 
rity of Japan. They have as much right to buy Lower Cali- 
fornia as we had to buy the Virgin Islands from Denmark not 
long ago. If that sale has been completed, or should be com- 
pleted in the future, what stands in the way of the transaction? 
Nothing in the world except the announcement and the enforce- 
ment of our own Monroe doctrine. If we could imagine the 
Japanese ambassador sitting upon one side of the table and the 
Mexican ambassador sitting upon the other side of the table 
negotiating about Lower California, and could witness the con- 
clusion when the Japanese ambassador said, " There is your 
money," and the Mexican ambassador said, " There is your 
deed," the transaction would be complete. If either one of them 
had lifted his eyes ever so little, he would have seen the strong 
arm of the manhood of the United States declaring to the am- 
bassador of Japan, " You dare not buy," and to the ambassador 
of Mexico, " You dare not sell property that shall come under 
the domination of Japan and that lifts upon the threshold of 
the American Republic." 

Yet, with that sale consummated, or to be consummated, and 
with Lower California a part of the territorial integrity of 
Japan, there is not a man in the Senate who does not know that 
the news of that transaction would not be 24 hours old before 
an American Army would be marching to Lower California, and 
the Japanese outposts upon the point at Magdalena Bay would 
see the smoke of American men-of-war advancing to drive out 
the Japanese fleet from its assembly grounds. When the Amer- 
ican troops came on their way, and the American fleet proceeded 
toward the bay, under this treaty what would Japan do? She 
would say to England and to France and to Italy, the nations 
whose sons have mingled their blood with the blood of our 
own, " Come ; the United States by external aggression, is in- 
vading my territorial integrity, and I demand of France and 
England and Belgium and Italy that you rally around me and 
fight with me to offset the American Army that I see advanc- 
ing and the American Navy that is steaming toward my ves- 
sels." If France and England and Italy and Belgium kept 
their word as it is written in this treaty, they would be bound 
to come to the assistance of Japan as against the United 
States. 

If you say that the language of the treaty is that a regional 
understanding, whatever a regional understanding may be, like 
the Monroe doctrine, protects that territory against acquisition 
by purchase, as I have illustrated, you have made a proposition 
which fails upon the contemplation of it, for the Monroe doc- 
trine is neither international nor regional. It is an American 
self-protecting doctrine which had its origin in this country 
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alone, and whch must have its enforcement alone from this 
Nation. 

Before the treaty ©f peace, including the league of nations, 
with provisions such as I have indicated, can ever meet with 
the sanction of America, there must be written into it, not 
by interpretation, but by inseparable reservations which shall 
be interwoven into the language of the ratification itself, that 
nothing in it shall ever lessen or destroy the Monroe doctrine 
of the United States. [Applause in the galleries.] 

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair will have to ad- 
monish the occupants of the galleries that by the rules of the 
Senate applause is not tolerated. 
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